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Notes -
When did anti-racism become incorporated into a person's character after Civil Rights in the US? Talking to boomers, even liberal ones, it seems their attitude is mostly that personal prejudice is, while not encouraged, also not a big deal so long as you don't let it cloud your judgement in an official capacity (such as discriminating while hiring). Even many boomerlibs I know talk in racially disparaging terms about people they don't like (i.e. a black driver who cut them off). I'm around 30, and growing up in Houston with an ethnically diverse social group it seems that ideologically everyone was on board with equal opportunities, but if someone was personally racist it was more of a personal quirk than a major character flaw unless they were, like, in a criminal organization or something. I'm PMC, and grew up PMC going to public schools, so I may have been in a bubble.
To give a tongue in cheek quote from my dad, "When did being a racist become worse than being a serial killer?" It seems that there was a gap in between when everyone agreed the nation as a whole should act in a race-blind or even anti-racist way and when people decided that it's imperative that people as individuals abandon racist feelings/beliefs.
I'd also be interested in if/when this happened in other nations as well, such as the nations of Western Europe.
I remember listening to a podcast where two (older, white, liberal) hosts were talking about the movie, In Bruges, and they both discussed how the movie can be tough to watch these days because the protagonist, who is supposed to be likeable and sympathetic, says a bunch of racist, fatphobic, and retardphobic (?) things. And then one of the hosts had a moment of clarity and verbalized that the protagonist is also a literal hitman who murdered a child, which is substantially morally worse than making a joke about fat black women.
Isn't that just a matter of what's presently controversial?
In contemporary America, you expect everybody to know and accept that murder is bad. It is not controversial. The film In Bruges expects you to understand that murder is bad. It is, in a sense, already priced in. Add in that fictional violence is often treated symbolically, and not as seriously as real violence, and it does not occasion any cognitive dissonance for you to sympathise with the hitman. Child murder is presented as a flaw, and hating child murder does not position you on either side of a contemporary partisan conflict.
On the other hand, saying nasty things about a fat black woman does position you on this or that side of a present divide. Attitudes to fat people or mentally disabled people or whatever do code as left-wing or right-wing or the like.
Compare the way that, for example, in Mass Effect 3 (2012) you can carry out the genocide of entire species, but you cannot disapprove of gay marriage. In Dragon Age: Inquisition (2014) you can lobotomise people, control people through their drug addictions, and so on, but you cannot misgender Krem. Capital-E Evil choices are fine, as long as everyone knows they're evil, but being on the wrong side of a subject of present controversy, which codes political, is not fine. The low-stakes issues matter more than the high-stakes ones, not because they're more important, but because they sort people.
Gangster movies are almost always written with an implied moral framework where murder is not bad if done in a way which complies with the unwritten rules of gangsterism - with the paradigmatic example being the various killing Michael Corleone is involved with in The Godfather.
The child murder in In Bruges was bad because Colin Farrell's character killed (a) the wrong person by mistake and (b) a child. A clean hit on the priest he had been paid to kill would not have been a problem in gangster movie world. Although I agree with other posters that In Bruges is not actually written in this moral framework, and is arguably satirising it.
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